This invention relates to hammerhead ribozymes and their interaction with substrate RNA.
Hammerhead ribozymes are generally described by Haseloff and Gerlach (1988) Nature, 334, 555. In this article, the design of new ribozymes and testing of a synthetic ribozyme is discussed, as well as their application in vitro and in vivo. FIG. 1 is a diagrammatic representation of a hammerhead ribozyme and its substrate (where N represents any nucleotide, H represents A, U or C, and I, II and III represent various stems of the ribozyme); the closed circles represent nucleotide bases in the substrate.